Wait and See on IE 8

Internet Explorer 8 is coming! Yay! And it will be standards compliant! Woo hoo! I can't wait to get my hands on it!

But just when will that be? Looks like there will be an initial beta sometime in the first half of 2008 (which probably means May or June).

Okay, so I guess I won't get to play around with it anytime soon. But did you see that IE 8 passed the Web Standards Project's Acid2, a key test for determining the standards compliance of a Web browser? That's something that Firefox hasn't been able to do yet, so take that Mozilla!

Well, an internal build of IE 8 passed the Acid2 test. I'm not sure if we can even call it an alpha. But this must mean that IE 8 will be standards compliant, right?

Hmm...I'm not too sure about that. Now that I think about it, I think I'll wait until I see a final shipping version of Internet Explorer 8 before I get too excited about its proposed features and standards compliance.

Because when it comes to Microsoft and the promises of early alphas and prototypes, cautious skepticism isn't a bad thing.